5 Hilarious Ways Game Designers Are Messing With Pirates

Video game developers, like most creators, are tired of having their shit brazenly stolen by anonymous pirates. However, as has been proven time and time again, eradicating online theft is damn near impossible, at least without making things too annoying for the legitimate buyers.

#5. Crysis Warhead Turns Your Bullets into Chickens

Crysis Warhead is a first-person shooter where you portray a battle-hardened soldier with a shitload of guns and armor fighting hostile alien forces. No game before or since has boasted such a unique plot. Or at least none that have also featured a gun that shoots a rapid-fire stream of flailing chickens, which is what you wind up with if your copy of Crysis Warhead is stolen.

The eager pirate boots up the game, grabs his dual-wielded machine pistols, pulls the trigger, and ... sprays a barrage of chickens through the air:

Something we've been begging the gaming industry for since day one.

Yep, Warhead's developers sat down and tried to think of ways to fuck up the game for anybody who illegally downloaded their copy and came up with "all guns become Chicken Gun." It doesn't matter which gun -- you're spraying chicken bullets like it's going out of style:

If only they'd included a physics engine that allowed the chickens to kill the enemy with their blunt force trauma.

No matter how many times you upgrade, the results are the same: Chicken Gun. You don't even get bigger chickens or anything like that. It is a thing of beauty:

In case you're wondering, chicken bullets do no damage whatsoever, meaning you can't kill anybody, and the game cannot be won. You can't die, either, because the bad guys use chickens, too. You could seriously "play" this game for all eternity and never get anywhere, you and your enemies endlessly bouncing streams of poultry off of one another in a sad metaphor for the futility of warfare.

However, shooting enough chickens at a building will actually demolish it (without harming the chickens), so if that's your idea of a good time, have at it.

OK, we actually do want to try that.

Sadly, the developers didn't include any clucking noises, which is a damn shame. Watching the most fruitless gunfight of all time while thousands of chickens tumble through the air squabbling their little heads off might have been a feature actually worth paying more for. Still, when it comes to sheer entertainment value, we guess the mindless complaining of hackers who don't understand that they're the reason chicken bullets exist will have to suffice:

#4. Serious Sam's Seriously Invincible Scorpion

Serious Sam 3 is a first-person shooter where you portray a battle-hardened soldier with a shitload of guns fighting hostile alien forces. Yes, that is exactly what we said about Crysis Warhead. But Sam doesn't have armor, and his game takes place 200 years in the future, so it's a totally different concept.

One thing the games do have in common, though, is a dedication to creatively pissing off pirates. Where Crysis has chickens, Sam has scorpions. Well, just one scorpion. One big, terrifying, completely invulnerable, utterly murderous, lightning-fast scorpion.

If you went to the store and bought the game for real, you'll never run into this guy. But if you didn't, and you chose to get cute with the hacking and the cracking, be prepared for it to relentlessly stalk you, from the beginning of the game until you can't run anymore. Because you are dead. Because it has killed you. Because you are a thief.

You cannot stop it. You cannot kill it. Any shots you land will make it spill blood, but it seemingly has a never-ending supply of the stuff, because it keeps coming at you. Running away is useless, as it can catch up to you in a nanosecond. Literally your only hope of survival is to turn off the game, dig into your soda-and-Doritos fund, and buy a legit goddamn copy.

In the beginning, it was highly likely that pirates didn't even realize what was going on and assumed that this was just another challenge -- a ridiculously hard monster with a secret weakness that simply needed to be uncovered (we'd love to know the record for "most time spent trying to kill the unkillable anti-piracy monster"). The secret's out, though, and the hacker community's fully aware of what this enemy signifies. And they STILL want to fight it:

Grand Theft Auto IV is one of the most popular games of all time, as well as one of the most pirated. Even before the game was officially released, over 17,000 illegal downloads were recorded. The hardened criminal you portray in the game would be so proud.

Naturally, Rockstar Games saw this coming and took measures to punish anyone who stole the game. Now, while their methods didn't make the game completely unplayable, they sure as hell caused some major headaches, Cloverfield style. When your computer or console detects a pirated copy of GTA IV, everything is normal for a few minutes. So the pirate thinks, "Hey, I'm home free. Piracy rules!" Sure it does, much like slowly succumbing to alcohol poisoning rules. Because after a short while, you start to notice a not-so-subtle change:

It's the same game, only with the wobbliest, clumsiest, drunkest camera imaginable. Pirates found themselves in an environment that was full of life and under the effects of an earthquake that nobody, not even the main character, seemed to notice.

Via Gta.wikia.comJust pretend you forgot your glasses and have an inner ear infection.

Despite hiring the cameraman from The Bourne Identity and injecting him with Quaaludes, the game is actually still playable, although the inevitable motion sickness you'll suffer might be a slight distraction.

That's why Rockstar coded another anti-piracy trigger, because overly patient pirates deserve even more punishment. Glitch No. 2 makes it so that any car you drive only goes in one direction, auto-accelerating the entire time. Also, it will be smoking and close to exploding the second you hop in.

Exiting the car won't do much good, since it'll just speed away the second you get out. Find another car, and the same shit happens again.

And yes, the camera is still shaking the entire time. And no, pirates didn't get the hint, going online to find out why their illegally obtained copy isn't working perfectly:

Via Gtaforums.comSomewhere on WebMD, there's a post from his mother, asking if she can still abort him.